Read The Magnificent Bastards for Free Online

convinced that their allies had forewarned the NVA about Operation Night Owl. The troops had other explanations. “We had to tape everything down to make it silent,” commented a regimental sniper attached to Echo Company, “but if you ever heard a Marine company going through the night, especially when they’re tired, you’d know we were fooling ourselves.”
    Come daylight, the companies returned to their patrol bases. Just east of Lai An, the Vietnamese scout with Echo Company talked a wounded NVA out of a bunker in which he’d been discovered. Skirting on past Pho Con, Echo came under a thirty-two-round barrage of 130mm artillery fire from the DMZ while crossing the big, calf-deep rice paddy. It offered no cover, and Echo made a run for it. “Hell, the CP group got in front of the platoons,” remembered the company’s forward observer (FO). “We were really humping to get out of that goddamn place.” The soft paddies absorbed the shells before they exploded. “You’d hear these things come in and you’d dive under water with your mouth open for the concussion,”commented the attached sniper. “The thing would blow up, then you’d hear shrap-metal just raking overhead. You’d get up and run again—and then you’d dive underwater, get up, and run again.…”
    Marine artillery fired counterbattery missions, followed by three air strikes on suspected enemy gun positions. There were seven secondary explosions. Echo Company had one man slightly wounded. Before Echo pushed on for Nhi Ha, a medevac landed for the wounded prisoner they had in tow throughout the barrage. Talk was that the enemy soldier had been hit again by his own artillery. Whatever the specifics of his injuries, he did not survive, as was recorded in the BLT journal: “POW was DOA at DHCB.”
    Captain Mastrion did not make Golf Company’s early afternoon hump back to Lam Xuan West. After bringing in a Sea Horse for the last of the wounded—and their one poncho-covered killed in action (KIA)—Mastrion wanted to get in a quick catnap before they saddled up to depart Pho Con. He woke up in excruciating pain. His back muscles had spasmed, and he could neither feel nor move his legs. Mastrion was finally medevacked.
    Lieutenant Deichman, the exec, got Golf Company moving again after taking some twenty rounds of flat-trajectory artillery fire—and after Lieutenant Acly laid in a smoke screen to cover their movement. Golf’s hump back to Lam Xuan West and Echo’s return to Nhi Ha relieved a squad-sized detachment that had been sent up from battalion to guard the footbridge between the two hamlets during the night. The Marines had set up on the Nhi Ha side with a dangerously thin half-moon of one-man fighting holes.
    “Without a doubt, this was the most hair-raising night I spent in Nam,” wrote Cpl. Peter W. Schlesiona, late of Golf Company. He had been sent back to battalion with severe jungle rot and ringworm, and was the man in charge of the detail. He and another corporal alternated between radio watch and walking the line to keep people awake. During the night, they heard the sounds of Golf’s fight and of the helicopters. “Asit was night, we rightly assumed these were medevac choppers,” wrote Schlesiona. “This made us particularly bitter the next morning as we helplessly watched Vietnamese civilians looting the personal effects that Golf Company Marines had left at their positions in Lam Xuan West. The most we could do was fire, uselessly, over their heads, as any direct action would have meant deserting our positions.”
    The battalion’s assistant operations officer, Capt. “J. R.” Vargas, took command of Golf Company after its return to Lam Xuan West. His was only an interim command—until a full-time replacement could be found for Mastrion—but Golf was glad to have him aboard. More precisely, they were glad to have him
back
aboard: Captain Vargas had previously commanded the company for more than two months and was,